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"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague." -Cicero

Intercepting thousands of phone calls is easy for government
agencies. But quickly analyzing the calls and identifying the callers
can prove a difficult task.

Now one company believes it has solved the problem—with a countrywide
biometric database designed to store millions of people’s
“voice-prints.”

Russia’s Speech Technology Center, which operates under the name SpeechPro in the United States, has invented what it calls “VoiceGrid Nation,”
a system that uses advanced algorithms to match identities to voices.
The idea is that it enables authorities to build up a huge database
containing up to several million voices—of known criminals, persons of
interest, or people on a watch list. Then, when authorities intercept a
call and they’re not sure who is speaking, the recording is entered into
the VoiceGrid and it comes up with a match. It takes just five seconds
to scan through 10,000 voices, and so long as the recording is decent
quality and more than 15 seconds in length, the accuracy, SpeechPro
claims, is at least 90 percent.

The technology has already been deployed across Mexico, where it is
being used by law enforcement to collect, store, and search hundreds of
thousands of voice-prints. Alexey Khitrov, SpeechPro’s president, told
me the company is working with a number of agencies in the United States
at a state and federal level. He declined to reveal any names because
of nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements. But Khitrov did divulge
that various versions of the company’s biometric technology are used in
more than 70 countries and that the Americas, Europe, and Asia are its
key markets. Not all of its customers are law enforcement agencies,
either. SpeechPro also designs voice recognition technology that can be
used in call centers to verify the identities of customers. Depending on
the size and specifics of the installation, it can cost from tens of thousands up to millions of dollars.

The FBI is separately pursuing voice recognition
as part of its efforts to take advantage of various biometric methods
of investigation, and the National Security Agency has also supported the development of the technology.

However, the advance of a mass, countrywide voice recognition system
raises some obvious concerns. Russian secret services watchdog Agentura.ru reported
earlier this year that Speech Technology Center’s products have been
sold to countries including Kazakhstan, Belarus, Thailand, and
Uzbekistan—hardly bastions of human rights and democracy. What if the
VoiceGrid Nation system were in the hands of an authoritarian
government? It has the technical capacity, for example, to store a
voice-print of every single citizen in a country the size of
Bahrain—with a population of 1.3 million—which would allow state
security agencies to very effectively monitor and identify phone calls
made by targeted political dissidents (or anyone else for that matter).

When I ask Khitrov about this, he uses an analogy about the character Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment,
who killed an old woman with a stolen ax. “People have used axes
domestically for hundreds of years, but some people choose to turn it
into a weapon,” he says. “We just make sure that we work with trusted
law enforcement agencies and try to make sure that they use it
properly.” SpeechPro’s technology is used for only “very noble causes,”
he adds, citing a case in Mexico where he says it was used to identify
and find kidnappers who made ransom calls before they were about execute
a person. Though when I ask for more examples of how VoiceGrid is being
used in Mexico, he admits, “We don’t know the specifics because that’s
their information.”